English
Related papers

Related papers: Variance Reduction Based Experience Replay for Pol…

200 papers

Recent advancements in LLM post-training, particularly through reinforcement learning and preference optimization, are key to boosting their reasoning capabilities. However, these methods often suffer from low sample efficiency and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zichuan Liu , Jinyu Wang , Lei Song , Jiang Bian

While Experience Replay - the practice of storing rollouts and reusing them multiple times during training - is a foundational technique in general RL, it remains largely unexplored in LLM post-training due to the prevailing belief that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Charles Arnal , Vivien Cabannes , Taco Cohen , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive success in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with on-policy algorithms such as PPO, GRPO, and REINFORCE++ serving as the dominant paradigm.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Weiyu Ma , Yongcheng Zeng , Yan Song , Xinyu Cui , Jian Zhao , Xuhui Liu , Mohamed Elhoseiny

Environments with procedurally generated content serve as important benchmarks for testing systematic generalization in deep reinforcement learning. In this setting, each level is an algorithmically created environment instance with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Minqi Jiang , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

Multi-Agent Experience Replay (MER) is a key component of off-policy reinforcement learning~(RL) algorithms. By remembering and reusing experiences from the past, experience replay significantly improves the stability of RL algorithms and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Kailash Gogineni , Yongsheng Mei , Peng Wei , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani

While experience replay is essential for data efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), standard methods treat the replay buffer as a passive memory system, prioritizing samples based on numerical prediction errors rather than their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yanan Xiao , Yixiang Tang , Zechen Feng , Lu Jiang , Minghao Yin , Pengyang Wang

We study behavior-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), where regularization toward a reference distribution (the dataset in offline RL or the base model in LLM RL finetuning) is essential to prevent value over-optimization caused by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Haoran Xu , Kaiwen Hu , Somayeh Sojoudi , Amy Zhang

Policy evaluation is a core component of many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and a critical tool for ensuring safe deployment of RL policies. However, existing policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance or bias. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shripad Vilasrao Deshmukh , Will Schwarzer , Scott Niekum

Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Yang Liu , Prajit Ramachandran , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Replaying data is a principal mechanism underlying the stability and data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We present an effective yet simple framework to extend the use of replays across multiple experiments, minimally…

Reinforcement learning algorithms can acquire policies for complex tasks autonomously. However, the number of samples required to learn a diverse set of skills can be prohibitively large. While meta-reinforcement learning methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Russell Mendonca , Xinyang Geng , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Experience replay enables off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) agents to utilize past experiences to maximize the cumulative reward. Prioritized experience replay that weighs experiences by the magnitude of their temporal-difference error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Ang A. Li , Zongqing Lu , Chenglin Miao

We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

While Reinforcement Learning for Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is powerful for training large reasoning models, its training dynamics harbor a critical challenge: RL overfitting, where models gain training rewards but lose generalization. Our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Zeng Zhiyuan , Jiashuo Liu , Zhangyue Yin , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Xipeng Qiu

We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Mohammadreza Nazari , Afshin Oroojlooy , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč

Reinforcement learning algorithms utilizing policy gradients (PG) to optimize Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) face significant challenges with sample inefficiency, hindering their practical applications. This inefficiency stems from two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Yudong Luo , Yangchen Pan , Han Wang , Philip Torr , Pascal Poupart

RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Current methods rely primarily on policy optimization frameworks like PPO and GRPO, which follow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haoran He , Yuxiao Ye , Qingpeng Cai , Chen Hu , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Ling Pan

In sparse reward scenarios of reinforcement learning (RL), the memory mechanism provides promising shortcuts to policy optimization by reflecting on past experiences like humans. However, current memory-based RL methods simply store and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Renye Yan , Yaozhong Gan , You Wu , Junliang Xing , Ling Liangn , Yeshang Zhu , Yimao Cai

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. With the paradigm shift toward self-evolving agentic learning, models are increasingly expected…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xinshun Feng , Xinhao Song , Lijun Li , Gongshen Liu , Jing Shao